Tips & Tricks: Get the Most Out of GitHub CoPilot | DevReach 2023

The speaker, Todd England, starts the session with a warm welcome, light-hearted remarks about resting and partying, and an introduction to the topic of GitHub Co-Pilot. He emphasizes the tool's ability to act as an AI pair programmer, assisting in code development. The audience is encouraged to participate in a group selfie to become part of a new tradition. Todd introduces himself as part of Microsoft's Cloud Advocacy team and invites the audience to connect with him on social media.

The paragraph explains how GitHub Co-Pilot works, using large language models to predict code completions based on existing code patterns. It also discusses the limitations of the tool, such as the impact of training data, the inability to compile code, and the necessity for users to provide context for effective suggestions. The speaker highlights the importance of understanding these limitations to avoid potential pitfalls when integrating AI tools into the coding workflow.

The speaker outlines various ways to provide context to GitHub Co-Pilot to improve its suggestions, including keeping relevant files open, using top-level comments, including in-file references, employing meaningful names, writing specific comments, and using sample code. These methods help GitHub Co-Pilot understand the user's intent and provide more accurate and targeted code completions.

The paragraph discusses the diverse applications of GitHub Co-Pilot, from writing basic code faster to aiding in remembering coding details, extending and refactoring existing code, explaining unfamiliar code, understanding and fixing errors, and even adding tests to a project. The speaker emphasizes the tool's potential to enhance various aspects of the development process beyond just writing code.

The speaker conducts a live demonstration using GitHub Code Spaces, showcasing GitHub Co-Pilot's capabilities in real-time. The demo includes creating a function to sanitize HTML from a string, using specific and short comments, and trusting but verifying the suggestions provided by the tool. The speaker also demonstrates how to iterate on suggestions and use the explain feature to understand the code provided by GitHub Co-Pilot.

The paragraph focuses on the process of refining code through iteration using GitHub Co-Pilot. The speaker demonstrates how to use direct prompts, function names, and the explain option to achieve the desired code outcomes. The importance of being descriptive in naming variables and functions is highlighted as a way to guide the AI towards providing useful completions.

The speaker shows how GitHub Co-Pilot can assist in documenting code and adding tests. Using slash commands within the tool, the speaker demonstrates the automatic generation of documentation for methods and the creation of test files. The paragraph also covers how to ask GitHub Co-Pilot for guidance on installing testing frameworks and resolving errors encountered during testing.

The speaker guides the audience through creating a CSS stylesheet with GitHub Co-Pilot. By providing goals and specific comments, the tool helps generate styles for a webpage's header and footer. The speaker also addresses the limitations of generating large amounts of content like Lorem Ipsum and instead uses an efficient method to achieve the desired result.

The paragraph demonstrates iterative code refactoring using GitHub Co-Pilot. The speaker uses the tool to correct function names to camel case and discusses the importance of context when suggesting changes. The speaker also shows how to use the inline chat feature to get suggestions for code improvements and how to accept or discard these suggestions.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of having the right files open when using GitHub Co-Pilot to ensure contextually accurate suggestions. By opening the to-do service file, the tool provides suggestions that closely match the existing coding style and project structure. The paragraph also covers the tool's ability to refactor code to meet specific coding standards.

The speaker concludes with a demonstration of using GitHub Co-Pilot for debugging and understanding exceptions in Visual Studio 2022. By intentionally causing a stack overflow error, the speaker shows how the tool can explain the error and guide the user towards a solution. The paragraph highlights the tool's potential to enhance the debugging process and improve developer productivity.

The speaker recaps the key points discussed during the session, including the importance of using single, specific, and short prompts, trusting but verifying the suggestions, and the critical role of context. The paragraph also looks forward to future capabilities of GitHub Co-Pilot, such as handling pull requests, and encourages the audience to explore upcoming features and participate in Co-Pilot Adventures for a fun coding experience.